Perception of advertising in social networks by the Catalan young-adult population

Abstract

Today, social networks are part of many people’s daily lives, using them as a form of contact or entertainment, or to search for information of all kinds, including about what they want to buy. The objective of this study is to determine the way in which advertising on social networks affects the purchasing behavior of the Catalan young-adult population and to discover the way in which these people perceive the advertising impacts, as well as the effects which these impacts exert on them. Quantitative methodologies of univariate and bivariate statistics have been used, based on the study of data from a survey of people between 18 and 40 years of age residing in Catalonia. It is concluded that the main sociodemographic factor that bears a significant relationship with purchasing decisions based on advertisements on the social networks is young people’s employment situation, since employed users are the ones who show the greatest willingness to make purchases of this type. Other determining factors that promote purchases based on social-network advertising are prior knowledge of the product and the personalization of ads.